We all know that there are 9 factions so far in the world of Ashan. And in the current Heroes VI there are 7 magic schools.

The Magic schools are the only thing, apart from the Blood/Tear reputation, that makes difference between individual factions and their Heroes. So if we would expect that there will be no new magic school and no chages to the current system, what would the Four not present faction look like.

In the Heroes VI vanila, we have 5 factions. Four of them have acces to 5 magic schools, one has acces to 6. let us look at them
Heavan: Prime, Light, Fire, Earth, Air
Inferno: Prime, Dark, Fire, Earth, Air
Naga: Prime, Light, Water, Earth, Air
Necro: Prime, Dark, Water, Earth, Air
Orcs: Light, Dark, Fire, Earth, Air, Water

When we look at this Layout we can notice 4 important rules.
1: All dragon worshiping factions have acces to Prime magic
2: All stereotypical Evil factions have Dark, All stereotypical Good factions have Light
3: All factions have acces to the magic school of the God they worship.
4: We can see some clear counterparts that differ only in Light/Dark magic

So, knowing this, let us Try to create a theoretical layout of magic schools for the Four not present factions.
We Will hold on to these rules:A:A faction must have acces to magic dedicated to there GodB:Each faction has acces to 5 magic schools (Let us keep the 6 MS as an Orc speciality)C:The layout must by Unique, no other faction can have acces to exactly the same Magic schools.

Let us start with the Fortress faction aka the Dwarves. Dwarves worship Dragons, precisely the God of fire. This gives us the first two MS. They are commonly considered a Good faction so that would add the third one. Some of there unites were connected to thunder so why not try to maintain this connection. And finaly, we can use there hostile mountainous terain for the motive of the final shool. In the end we would end up with such an option.
Fortres: Prime, Light, Fire, Water, Air

I Would like to continue with the Wizzards. They themselves do not worship any god but are representatives of the pure potent magic power. so Prime is necessary for them. Also even though they are considerd good, I would give them a neutral status, thus providing them with both Light and Dark. Now that we freed ourselves from the Light/Dark stereotyp we can chose the final two schools freely. In my eyes a mage should be able to cast both Fireball (Fire) and Lightning (Air). If we would hold on to this stereotype, our Academy magic schools would look like this:
Academy: Prime, Light, Dark, Fire, Air

Now let us look at the Sylvan Elves. As dragon worshipers they shoud have Prime, and as Sylannas faitfull they need Earth. This is very limiting to us, due to the simple fact that Earth is with Air the most common school in the vanila Game, and if we want to use the affinity magic of Ligtht we have to look at the vanila game whot combinations of Earth Prime and Light have already been created. We will find out that Both Sanctuary and Heaven use Light, Prime, Earth and as suspectd Air. This means that we can not use both Earth and Air together and up with only one option:
Slyvan: Prime, Light, Eathr, Fire, Water

This is also the reason why we could not use Earth with the Dwarves, there would be no unique option for the Elves that need it due to their God.

But now let us look at their Fallen brothers, The Dark elves. There first two schools are defined by their Dragon. Darknes and Prime (prime for Dragon worshipers). And from our previous constructions, we know there are only two ways how to make them unique whithout the use of Light magic. So we can make them the Oposite of their forest loving ancestors, or as the oposite of their undeground rivals. I would personaly chose the first option.

After creating this potentional layout I looked at the statistics
All schools are more or less equally distributed between the factions
Water is presented 6 times,
Air, Fire and Earth 7 times,
Prime 8 times,
Light 5 times and Dark 4 times,

Ofcourse this could be true only if we hold on to the restrictions noted at the beginnig.

Sylvan: Prime, Light, Earth, Fire, Water
Dungeon: Prime, Dark, Earth, Fire, Water, Air (everything except light. They're heavy spellcasters that worship the Darkness Dragon)
Fortress: Prime, Light, Fire, Earth, Dark (The dwarves aren't like the wizards. They worship Arkath, the Fire Dragon. Definitely wouldn't have water, but I could see them with both dark & light)
Academy: Prime, Light, Dark, Fire, Air, Water, Earth (They're the wizards. They get everything)
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The Fortress is difficult. Following the rules, they would have the Haven set-up, which is bad, since we don't want to be two factions the same. The Dwarves would not get dark - Malassa's ways are not straight enough for them. Since they live below, the question is whether they really have a connection to Light. Considering the Haven set-up, IN THEORY this would mean:

Fortress: Prime, Fire, Earth, Air, Water.
HOWEVER. If Dwarves would get something like "Rune Magic" as a faction special, they MIGHT have only 4 magic schools, Rune Magic somewhat "covering" Prime Magic with a twist, that would make Dwarves:
Fire, Earth, Air, Water, RUNES

Sylvans are easy: since we don't want two factions to be alike, that leaves only: Prime, Earth, Fire, Water, Light

Lastly Dungeon. Dungeon is existing only, since they feel betrayed by SYLANNA. I suppose that might justify them being the only faction having no Earth, which would make themPrime, Dark, Fire, Water, Air
This would make them the only faction without access to at least either Regeneration or Healing - which makes full and perfect sense, if you look at them.

Fortress is something like Rune magic I'm sure, and the Elves probably some sort of critical hit bonus (for example level 1 all hits against core creatures have an additional 50% chance of crtical, lvl 2 is elite etc and lvl 4 chances raise against all even more)

Academy, the best I can think of now is additional spells, for example lvl 1 they get to cast another teir 1 spell, lvl 2 anothe teir 2 lvl 4 they get to cast 2 more spell, that might be imbal but maybe no depending on how they get gauges and also depending on their stats etc...

Academy should definitely have access to all schools, they study magic for breakfast JJ's idea for dungeon is great, however I do not agree about water for dwarves, Shalassa's mentality is not quite their thing. Earth should be a no brainer, you cannot have dwarves without stoneskin I am not sure about fire for sylvan considering Sylanna's mentality but on the other hand they have shown a rather hot temper in this incarnation so it's probably fair game. As for runic magic that would be a great twist to their former racial, having a set of might-magic and passive-active runes with interesting(as in wild!) effects.

Of course.. I wouldn't really mind if one faction had the same schools with another as long as it had a few unique spells to set it apart. If we introduced a couple of unique spells in each faction's favoured magic(ie light in haven, fire for dwarves, water for nagas etc) things would look so much better.
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Elvin you're a snowing Krogan.
-Adrius

Although H5-style Fortress is probably the least likely to return, and speaking for myself I really wouldn't at all be upset if they weren't included. Granted, they have a chance to do a lot better with Fortress than what they did in H5, which I found thoroughly underwhelming... 6 dwarf units in the line-up and a dragon for the 7th tier, come on.

The faction overall had the least impact in H5, with Hammers of Fate not being as impressive of a sell as Tribes of the East, and add it to the fact that there's not a lot of tradition going that would compel Ubi to include them again. I wouldn't at all mind if they just made another fresh faction, like they did with Sanctuary.

If they were included, I could see them as having darkness as a school since they're somewhat of a subterranean race; it's an element that they have a good deal of exposure to, plus they don't really come off as zealous as Haven or Sanctuary, so having both Light & Dark seems acceptable. Sure, they happen to be enemies with the dark elves, but not really mortal enemies in the way dark elves are enemies with sylvan, and the wizards are enemies with the necromancers.
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All fair points, Elvin and Blizz. It would be decided by two questions:

1) Earth and Air together doesn't seem to be a problem. How about Fire and Water in this time of Ashan? Can they "co-exist" or not?

2) Since this is basically the time of an Elrath/Malassa war, the question was, whether Light and Dark can co-exist or not? It's not impossible, that the Dwarves would be strictly neutral in this respect and might have accress to both or none.

As a note: I think, a guess on a possible Dungeon faction special is quite easy. I can imagine at least 3:
1) Dungeon gets to cast a Destruction spell as faction. This would be a dungeon-specific Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3 spell

2) Dungeon can negate the Magic Defense of any Basic (Tier 1), Elite (Tier 2) or Champion (Tier 3) stack as faction action for one turn.

Wow. I noticed that I am the only person who sees coherenc in the formula
Frozen mountain tops + Dwarves -> Acces to Water/Ice magic.

I do not think Mages should have acces to all magic schools. Especialy due to the fact that thay study, but not gather knowladge (we have Faceless for that) so came up with an alternative of my former purposel:

Wizards are on the magic edge of the spectrum in H6, even dungeon is not totally magic focused. It would be consistent to give them the benefit of all schools - even in H5 they had more access to magic than any other.
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Elvin you're a snowing Krogan.
-Adrius

Quote:Wizards are on the magic edge of the spectrum in H6, even dungeon is not totally magic focused. It would be consistent to give them the benefit of all schools - even in H5 they had more access to magic than any other.

sounds fine but i don't like it looking at the game as it works now.
that wouldn't make sense for might hero at all, and i actually think that master of dark and light is very nice and powerful.
H5 was different cup of tea as they were exclusively magic faction whereas now every faction is might and magic.
Call me boring but i prefer streamlined system just like in OP, and combo of light dark fire and air seems quite nice to me, and gives you that 'study' aspect with dark and light as well as the desert theme with fire and air.

Only issue with Academy getting everything would be that their heroes can pretty much copy any other faction hero (bar specialty), making the skill tree differences even smaller (as hard as that seemed to be).
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I made same puzzle game with magic schools as Dave_Jame in beta times (on paper for myself). And got same conclusions about Sylvan, Dungeon and Fortress (but no room for 'earth' hurts dwarf stereotype - you know mining-ore-metal-casting).
If we will try to force them to have Earth what should be gone?
Air? (that makes them Sylvan)
Fire? (Sanctuary.. and dwarves without forges? never)
Water? (hmm.. Haven) - yes i would like to swap them with Haven.
Haven without earth will be less turtling/healing faction. And I believe Dwarves can live without water (i know about 'ice in top of mountains' but maybe in this times of ashan history they are only living in underground? It was said that they where isolated faction so it is good explanation for me.
Also I don't believe that Ubi-hole will make additional Runes-magic for Arkhat followers - 'runes' will end as tear/blood abilities of their heroes (i actually can tolerate this).

As already proposed, Academy should have access to all magic schools but this mean troubles with balancing.

To make fully comprehensive plan we can add (no matter if they ever appear)FreeCities with: Air Fire Water Dark Prime.
In total this will end in: Air/Fire/Earth/Water x8, Light/Dark x6, Prime x9 - and the balance in elements is preserved

With Stronghold being the town that has access to all six Elements (Light and Dark among them) that's weak points. Why should Academy of all things don't have access to something Stronghold has access?

That would be just silly.

On the other hand it's clear that them Wizards would excel in Prime Magic, except that is inconsequential the way things are handled.

Quote:Wow. I noticed that I am the only person who sees coherenc in the formula
Frozen mountain tops + Dwarves -> Acces to Water/Ice magic.

I do not think Mages should have acces to all magic schools. Especialy due to the fact that thay study, but not gather knowladge (we have Faceless for that) so came up with an alternative of my former purposel:

Academy: Prime, Fire, Air, Water and Earth

I tend to agree with you on the dwarves part. Another clue is the synergie between fire and ice which must be there for a reason. Right now , ppl are wondering why since almost no decent caster can use fire+water (maybe monks but they have enough on their plates with uber light). I guess the freeze and burn combo is gonna be for the dwarves.

There are infinite ways to set up balances in the game, so giving Academy access to all schools doesn't have to be a blow out. It would probably mean they'd be more limited with their might skills. A might hero in Academy would be something like a "Battle Mage" and would still have a fairly heavy magic focus, then the "Archmages" would have a very heavy magic focus.
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